Hello to all musiclovers out there,
Here some remarks and a question from a (Musicbrainz/Picard) newbie,
I had quite some trouble getting the AcoustID / fingerprinting to work in Picard.
I installed Picard on a Linux Fedora 23 system.
In the help documentation I did not find any mentioning of the fact that you have to :
- download and install the fingerprint calculator
- get an AP key (what is that, I’m not a developer !)
Pressing the download button in the Picard options dialogue led me to the download page of AcoustID where I could see a number of “chromaprint…” files, but also the note:
“Most Linux distributions also have their own packages for Chromaprint.”
Aaah, very good, I started my Linux package manager (Yum/DNG) and looked for chromaprint, installed it and … and what now?
Eeuh… tell Picard where to find “it”, what is “it”, Various files (python scripts?) with “chromaprint” in the name, but which one to choose? None did work…
To make a long story short: Instead of installing chromaprint I downloaded the "fpcalc… " file from the forementioned page, unpacked it and, again… how/where to install??
So I just took a gamble and I copied it to home/.config/Musicbrainz directory, pointed Picard to it, got my API key(?) and HURRAY!! something worked.
That is to say: half of the files I threw at it came back with no results
I had used VLC player before and ALL files showed up with the proper name/artists!
How is that possible?
VLC and Picard use the same system? Why doesn’t Picard show the same good matches that VLC could find?
To get better matches should I change some of the matching thresholds, and which?
For some tracks to give a (correct!) match, I had to change
Minimal similarity for file lookups: 1%
and
Minimal similarity for matching files to tracks: 1%
Seems rather odd to me… even 10% accuracy did not work for some files.
To resume
I think that Picard and the fingerprinting system is a fantastic piece of engineering, but a manual that also covers Linux installations and more details would be very welcome.
thanks and enjoy!